The Black Friday shopping spree was more about consumer desperation than about consumer confidence.

Danny Schechter Last Modified: 05 Dec 2011 13:12

We all saw the shopocalpyse, as Reverend Billy of the Church of Stop Shopping calls it, on Black Friday. The big story became a shopper pepper-spraying others, and then a shot being fired. Not in most of the news: Occupy protesters in Oklahoma arrested at a Walmart for challenging blind consumerism.

That was the immediate news. The big story came a day later, calling this year's shopping surge the biggest ever, up 30 per cent.

Wow.

This news was viewed as a sign of consumer confidence that, with an earlier government report on a new wave of optimism released a week earlier, sent markets up.

But, as is so often the case, figures like these are designed more to foster public perceptions, not report truth. I have been following these numbers ever since making the film In Debt We Trust in 2006 and find them invariably misleading, perhaps by design.

First there is the good news in reports like this one on Bloomberg that get picked up widely: "Black Friday sales increased 6.6 per cent to the largest amount ever as US consumers shrugged off 9 per cent unemployment and went shopping".

remainder: http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2...